The Monarchy and the Junkers

The counter-revolution made much better use of the transition period provided by the Pfuel ministry. It surrounded Berlin more and more closely with a hundred cannons and an army of forty to fifty thousand men. It worked zealously to excite the masses of the capital to a disturbance that would serve as a pretext for military intervention.

For preference they would have liked to stage a copy of the Paris battles of June. They made a first attempt at that in the middle of October, when out-of-work craftsmen employed by the state to build a canal on the Köpenicker Felde, wrecked a machine which, with the approach of winter, threatened to take the last piece of bread out of their mouths. The desperate mood of these poor people is all the better explained by the fact that they were mainly skilled workers, like gold and silver-smiths, whose hands were being made less and less suitable for their proper trades by the heavy labour. The half embarrassed, half clumsy intervention of the Bürgerwehr led to an encounter in which several workers and several Bürgerwehr men were killed, but the Left deputies managed to settle the conflict before the army could be called in. The reaction then made one further attempt to inflame the workers by instructing the master builder running the canal site on the Köpenicker Felde ‘on the highest authority’ to sack in punishment not only those workers who had been involved in wrecking the machine but also hundreds of others who had not. But even this barbaric demagogy failed. The masses of the workers, organized and developed to a certain extent, knew very well whose interests would be best served by a bloodbath at that point.

The reaction had to make do with more modest measures for the salvation of the state. During October tumultuous crowds began to besiege the Playhouse where the Assembly was sitting. They did not listen to the Left, but to dubious demagogues like Count Bressler, who had befriended first the Left, then the ‘Junker Parliament’. It was later established in court that, in the critical October days, he tried to bribe workers to erect barricades. What was more, the daily more melancholy cries of the reaction that these mobs were terrorizing the parliamentary debates also cut little ice. The very same right-wing deputies who, during the attack on the Arsenal, when real proletarians had tried to drive the Assembly forward, had themselves stayed at home, now walked in and out of the hall freely. Even they did not dare to claim that their votes were adversely affected by fear of rioters, they merely complained that it ‘injured the dignity’ of the Assembly, that very same Assembly whose dignity they daily injured by their miserable intrigues. There are grounds for believing that reactionary provocations played a role in the riots outside the Playhouse. In any case, not only all impartial witnesses but even people like Gneist and Unruh, who kept a sharp look-out for even the slightest threat to person and property, have testified that, in free countries, the whole thing would only have aroused the most incidental interest.

The decisive blow fell in Vienna. Like the Berlin revolution, the counter-revolution too took its cue from the Austrian capital. After Radetzky’s victories in Italy the Austrian government rallied its half-barbaric Slavic nationalities and used them to smash the revolutionary, civilized nations of Germans and Magyars. On October 31, Prince Windischgrätz stormed Vienna, which fell after a brave defence. On the evening of the same day the Prussian Parliament accepted, after a passionate debate, a harmless motion from Rodbertus calling on the government to make urgent and energetic representations to the Imperial Regent to truly and effectively protect the national freedom that was endangered in the German parts of Austria and the threatened existence of the Imperial Diet and restore peace. On November 1, news of the fall of Vienna reached Berlin. Pfuel was immediately dismissed and Count Brandenburg entrusted with the formation of a new ministry. Brandenburg was a trinity of Junker, officer and Hohenzoller, an uncle of the King, the offspring of one of those double marriages through which King Frederick William II used to testify to his fear of God and his pious morals.

Count Brandenburg’s aim was the coup d’état in its most naked form, one which was too much even for the Right. Now the Assembly could either declare open war on the King by constituting itself as an independent power (but this tactic, which had Jacoby’s lively support , was much too revolutionary for the majority), or it could try to checkmate the new ministry by parliamentary means, but this method seemed too hopeless to the majority. Agreement was reached on a motion from the Left Centre to send a deputation to make representations to the King about the ‘state of the country’. It was a half-hearted step that betrayed to the King simultaneously the obstinacy and the impotence of the Assembly. That was already obvious in the external form of the Address the deputation was to hand the king. Jacoby, Bucher and Reichensperger were entrusted with drawing it up; into Bucher’s beautifully stylized draft, which earnestly drew to the King’s attention the ‘endlessly sad consequences’ of a deed ‘reminiscent of the fate of a neighbouring state’, Reichensperger embroidered all sorts of loyal phraseology about ‘His Majesty’s heart’, which was supposed to beat constantly for the good of the people.

After long negotiations with the aide-de-camp, von Mannteufel, who later became Field Marshal, the deputation was actually admitted to see the King at Sanssouci on November 2. As Unruh read the Address out, the King first fiddled with his sword and then turned his back on the deputation in that drastically inviting stance which is so popular among Berlin street arabs when they wish to display the opposite of respect, but which had never yet been tested in constitutional intercourse between a King and the representatives of the people. The astonished delegation watched at first in silence as the King, when the Address had been read, started to leave the room. Then Jacoby plucked up enough courage to ask if the King would grant the deputation an audience. At the rude answer, ‘No!’ he shouted after the King, who was disappearing into the ante-chamber, that it was his own hard luck if he didn’t want to hear the truth.

You might think that Jacoby’s comrades would have congratuled him for these words. Without being exactly original they suited the situation perfectly, and he had at least done something to extricate the deputation from the embarrassing situation into which the King’s extraordinary behaviour had put them. However, as soon as the King had left the room the majority of the deputation fell upon Jacoby with harsh rebukes, and scarcely had the aide-de-camp re-entered when Rodbertus, as he publicly boasted the following day in the Assembly, hurried to him ‘and begged him urgently to go in to his Majesty and to tell him that we were convinced that his Majesty’s feelings would be able to distinguish between the National Assembly’s Address and the last words heard from the deputation’. This is what these Peoples’ Representatives were like, even the best of them. While the King was having the swords whetted and the horses saddled and the cannon loaded to break up the organ of popular representation by military force, the leaders of Parliament excused themselves to the King’s aide-de-camp for their tack of loyal humility. Such a woeful policy could only give the reactionaries new courage.

They needed it. Brandenburg and Wrangel were nothing more than military moustaches, whose violent braggadocio aroused little confidence in the more thoughtful reactionaries. There was a popular joke at the time that von Mannteufel, was making the streets of Berlin unsafe, going around with a revolver trying to press-gang people into being ministers. After six days Brandenburg had not even gathered half a cabinet together. Some old war-horse had been ordered into the Ministry of War and two Vormärz bureaucrats had taken over Education and the Interior. No takers could be found for Foreign Affairs, Trade, Agriculture, Justice and Finance. The simple restoration of Vormärz absolutism and feudalism was such an impossibility that only the most utterly hidebound Junkers dreamt of it. Wagener declared point-blank it was a reactionary utopia, and even Brandenburg never tired in his assurances that he was a constitutionalist from the parting in his hair to the soles of his shoes, although for him constitutionalism was an enigma with seven seals.

The counter-revolution had to find support from at least the Right before launching the decisive blow against the Assembly. But there was a problem: even the Right had repeatedly stated that the monarch could not dissolve the Assembly. The principle of mutual agreement made no sense, since two sovereigns can no more remain side by side in one state than two suns in the sky, but the bourgeoisie was bogged down in it and could not work itself free at the drop of a hat. According to this principle the King could no more dissolve the Assembly than the Assembly could depose the King. The to-ing and fro-ing in agonizing suspense lasted a whole week, during which the Assembly occupied itself with debates on matters of indifference, after once more rejecting a proposal from the Left to set up a Committee of Safety. During this period the most total calm reigned in the city. The rioters of October had disappeared as if the ground had swallowed them up, because the counter-revolution had seized the helm, but it did not know where it was going.

Meanwhile a marriage of true minds took place between Count Brandenburg and the Right. The how and the where have never been discovered in detail, but the results of their secret intrigues emerged immediately to the light of day. If the King could not dissolve the Assembly, he could move its meeting place, and adjourn it for that purpose. A beautiful excuse for this was offered by the ‘frequent anarchist movements’ and ‘criminal demonstrations’ in the capital aimed at ‘intimidating’ the Assembly. How could such tender solicitude for the independence of the Assembly be an attempt on its life? It was the old plan that the Right had already hatched out once before at the time of the attack on the Arsenal. If the Assembly agreed to this then a precedent had been created which, if need be, gave the King the authority even to dissolve it. If it witheld agreement, it was rebelling against a legitimate disposition by the monarchy, which intended nothing worse than to protect the Assembly from the violence of the mob. In their justified anxiety over Count Brandenburg’s mental abilities, the right wing thoughtfully provided him with their own member, Rintelen, a well-proven shyster, as Minister for Justice. As recently as November 2, it is true, Rintelen had been part in the pilgrimage to Sanssouci to protest against the Brandenburg ministry, but when has a Prussian Obertribunalsrat ever hesitated to place the seal of the law today upon the atrocities that he cursed yesterday? With this tidy little plan in his pocket, Brandenburg betook himself to Unruh to sound him out. And if he knew how to read the soul of the bourgeoisie, then Unruh’s immediate answer – that the majority of the Assembly, the Centre factions, the Left, and he himself as President at their head, would never agree to adjournment and removal – must have filled him with honest pleasure.

Unruh took the feudal absolutist reaction very seriously, and he by no means intended to compromise with it as cheaply as the Right. But he took a second popular revolution even more seriously, and the need to avoid one at any price was, as Unruh himself publicly stated, the real reason for his recalcitrance. If the Assembly allowed its proceedings to be adjourned, its standing in the eyes of the people, long since shaky, would collapse completely. Then it was to be feared that ‘political groupings would gain control of the movement’, in which case ‘street fighting would be inevitable’, as Unruh says in his memoirs. On the other hand, if the Assembly opposed the monarchy’s instructions, it would gain standing in the eyes of the masses, and it could still make such a muddle of things that no power on earth could put them right. Unruh correctly believed that he could carry out that task like a master.

However slender Brandenburg’s grasp of the general situation, he now had a political guideline in his hand that he could reel in. On November 9, he told the Assembly that he had a royal message adjourning it until November 27 and removing it to Brandenburg-am-Havel. When Unruh declared that he could not close the session without the agreement of the Assembly and would therefore put the question for them to decide, Brandenburg protested ‘solemnly’ against the ‘illegal’ continuation of business and left the room. He barricaded himself in the War Ministry and Wrangel marched into Berlin with a great force of troops. It took only three days for the military moustaches to stamp out all public rights: the laws of April 6 and 8 and the laws on the Bürgerwehr and on personal freedom. On the other hand they provided themselves with a new legal basis by declaring a state of siege, for which they lacked any legal pretext or any factual occasion. They established the naked rule of the sabre.